by Morten Lund

There will be a gloriously overwhelming Winter Olympics served up in Salt Lake City in February 2002, with crowds in the tens of thousands and huge spectacles to amuse them. It wasn’t always like this. In fact, in the beginning, it wasn’t anything like this. The Winter Olympic Games, although provided for in the charter of the International Olympic Committee as founded in 1895, was an orphan child for several reasons. The first was that most countries in the organization had no interest. The second was that even those who did had no mountain resorts capable of staging such Games.
At the beginning of the modern Olympic movement, almost every nation worth the name had a large city with a national athletic arena suitable for track and field events. Almost none had a large resort with ski jumps, ice skating arenas and so on. So first of all, there had to be winter resorts. Second, there had to be a tradition of winter competitions on skis, skates, and so on.
Lastly, the nations that were foremost in the sport of skiing, the core sport of any Winter Games, had to be willing. As it happened, the foremost ski countries, the Scandinavian nations of Finland, Sweden and Norway, had their own ideas about the way in which international ski events ought to be contested, that is, in an atmosphere of purity and amateurism free from commercial taint.
As ski historian John Allen has documented, these concepts were all summed up in the Norwegian word idraet, a complex concept having to do with health, morality, citizenship and honoring one’s ancestors. This did not fit well with the necessity for a mountain resort large enough to hold an Olympics. A resort is all about making money. Norwegians, particularly, had to be dragged, kicking and protesting, into a Winter Games featuring luxury hotels with the heavy scent of money hanging over the scene. But even the Norwegians finally capitulated to the magic of the word “Olympics.”

BIRTH PANGS OF THE WINTER GAMES

If Greece was the mother of the Olympics, France was the mother of the Winter Games. Early on, the International Olympic Committee had decided that there would definitely be an Olympic Winter Games—sometime. The event was first scheduled for Germany in 1916, but was cancelled when World War I intervened.
Eight years later, Paris was awarded the 1924 Summer Games, and a very aggressive French Olympic Committee was determined to hold history’s first-ever Winter Games, as well.
The French buildup to the Games had begun more than fifty years earlier. To be blunt about it, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the French felt they needed mountain troops.
This was a time of great admiration for the effectiveness of Norwegian ski troops. The Russians, Swiss, Germans, Austrians, and Italians had established mountain troops by 1872. The French followed in 1888 with their Chasseurs alpins, staffed by French officers who had learned to ski from Norwegians. Now the officers began looking for recruits.
The obvious candidates, mountain farm boys, just were not up to it. Rather than a sturdy, self-reliant and fit bunch, the French mountain boys were a sickly lot who stayed indoors all winter long. Circa 1900s, the French military encouraged a learn-to-ski program, aimed at its mountain farm boys. Mountain troops sent back to their villages were making kid-size skis and teach village boys to ski. The sport had done wonders for the health and fighting spirit of Norwegian lads, so it was said.
There was an urban effort as well. Beginning in 1910, France established a Council of Health in every French region with the aim of encouraging public fitness. One of their aims was to get city-dwelling kids, who were in as bad shape as their mountain cousins, into the mountains on skis in the winter. French ski clubs were founded with state backing, and mountain towns given the power to tax winter vacationers in order to build up winter sports facilities.
The Club Alpin de France founded a Winter Sports Commission that was given state funds and responsibility for building up “skiing’s patriotic and military importance and its mobilizing force as a sport.”
“The amelioration [need for improvement] of the [French] race haunted us,” admitted Henry Cuënot, a leading CAF spokesman. “One knew that Norwegians took to skiing as part of their regeneration. One understood its patriotic and military reach. One wanted to make strong men and strong soldiers.”
The Winter Sports Council mounted Winter Sports Weeks—competitions on skis to which other nations were invited—beginning in 1907 at Mont Genèvre. Next came the 1908 Winter Sports Week at Chamonix. It drew 2,000 spectators.
In 1912, a Chamonix Winter Sports Week drew more than 12,000 visitors, one of the largest crowds at an international ski event before World War I. The IOC, encouraged, voted to schedule the first Winter Olympics in 1916 in Berlin. Even Norway voted yes. But World War I intervened.
Postwar Chamonix grew apace as a ski resort. It had the best terrain and the most hotels. By 1924, Chamonix was ready for an Olympics. The IOC was ready for an Olympics. The French were ready for an Olympics. The Norwegians were not.
The Scandinavians had changed their minds. They had been running the international ski competition since the first Nordic Games at Stockholm in 1901, where they dominated the nordic-only world championships. They now saw a Winter Olympics as eroding their rule.
The IOC appeased them, declaring that the IOC would put on a Winter Games not officially “Olympic.” The champions would have “no right to medals.” Further, the Chamonix Games were “not an integral part of the Olympic Games.” The French tradition of Winter Sports Weeks reassured the Scandinavians that this was just another international winter meet held amid their first class hotels by the hospitable French.
The French kept up a brave front of “non-Olympism” until the Chamonix Winter Games got underway. Then the difference with a Winter Olympic Games became very small. The French even arranged that the athletes be sworn to the Olympic oath.
During the Chamonix Games, the skiing nations all founded the Fédération Internationale de Ski, or FIS. The next year, the FIS requested that the Games be retroactively made a bonafide Olympics. The IOC certified the Games as truly Olympic, entitling all the winners to be awarded the first Winter Olympic medals ever struck.

CHAMONIX 1924
The First Winter Games

The First Olympics was all about the Norwegians, who very nearly took all twelve of the first Winter Olympic medals. In the modest program at Chamonix, the Norwegians won eleven out of twelve individual contests—a Finn sneaked into third in the 18-km cross country. There were four individual competitions—the special jump, the 18-km cross country, the 50-km cross country and the nordic combined (18-km score combined with the nordic jump score).
There was also a fifth competition, the 18-km military ski patrol event, a shoot-and-march from which the biathlon presumably is descended. It was won by the Swiss but is left out of many compilations of Olympic medals even though the military event has had a historic input in the struggle to establish a Winter Olympic Games.
The first modern Games, held at Athens in 1896, were the work of Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France, inspired by the ancient Greek Olympics. The military had had nothing to do with re-creating the first Olympic summer games. This can account for the 1924 military patrol events being snubbed. The event is not listed in many instances, as in Jakob Vaage’s 1969 Norske Skiløper, but is listed in Roland Palmedo’s 1937 Skiing, the International Sport.
The seven-man American team at the First Winter Olympics had been picked at the whim of various influential members of the National Ski Association (NSA) and the eastern ski establishment. This first American Winter Olympic ski team was captained by Johnny Carleton, captain of Dartmouth’s 1924 ski team and then a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He was the only second-generation American on the team. The others were of Norwegian extraction, notably Anders Haugen, the best U.S. jumper. The Americans, entering only the jumping events, were shut out by the Norwegians, who came to Chamonix with an advantage.
A hundred years earlier in Norway, when the sport was all but unknown on the Continent, skiing was a young man’s sport encouraged by the military, which had recently deployed ski troops against the Swedes. But skiing in Norway had spread beyond the military. On February 3, 1820, the earliest-known ski advertisement ran in Norway’s national paper Morgenbladet proclaiming, “good skis for skiers.”
Given a hundred-year head start, the strong position of skiing in Norwegian culture in the late 1800s, and the refinement over time of Norwegian competitors, it would take another generation before the rest of the ski world began to match the Norwegian Olympic contingent as a whole in jumping and cross-country.
In 1924, the Norwegian cross country team astonished the rest of the world by poling straight up the steepest inclines where the others zigzagged or herringboned. An observer of the 18-km, Lt. Col. H. de Watteville, writing for the 1924 British Ski Year Book, estimated that Haug, who started fifty-sixth, “must have passed forty competitors…” De Watteville added, “The Norwegians understand the business of racing as it is not known in Central Europe.”
Thorleif Haug was Norway’s champion of champions, the first Winter Games triple-gold winner. He won the 50- kilometer cross country, the 18-km cross country and the combined cross country and jump. His teammate Tullin Thams won the special jump in which Haug came in third, or so it seemed at the time. De Watteville writes that the “Americans jumped with fierce determination that was admirable but their style was atrocious.” Nevertheless America’s Anders Haugen came in fourth.
But wait. In 1974 at the fiftieth anniversary meeting of that first Norwegian team, it was discovered that the jumping scores had been miscalculated and Haugen had really won the bronze in the event. The Norwegians, including Haug’s widow, insisted on bringing Haugen to Norway and presenting him with Haug’s bronze medal and asked the International Olympic Committee and the FIS to rectify the record. The FIS made the change; the IOC, actually, never did.
Haugen certainly deserved his medal but it raised hell with history. In all the record books published after 1974, and in the legend in the display glass case holding the medal at the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame in Ishpeming, Michigan, Haugen is the winner of the bronze, which makes him the first American Olympic medalist.
In all the record books and articles published before 1974, including the as-yet-unchanged record of the French Olympic Committee, Haug is still listed as the bronze medalist. All accounts published before 1974 laud Haug as the only winner of four medals in ski events during a single Olympics. Books written before 1974 cite the 1948 Olympian Gretchen Fraser as the first American Olympic medalist. Any questions?
The confusion leads to the conclusion that the FIS may have done the right thing after Austrian women’s world champion of the 1970s, Erika Shinegger, discovered she was really he, or rather Erik. The FIS ruled that all records left standing after a decent interval for protests would continue to stand despite any subsequent discoveries.

ST. MORITZ 1928
The Hoetl Olympics

The Norwegians almost torpedoed the Second Winter Olympics, which had been scheduled for St. Moritz. A vocal faction in the Norwegian ski association felt that they had been betrayed by the International Olympic Committee’s switch of the 1924 events from a series of non-Olympic nothings to a full Olympic Games. Members fulminated against the concept of a “hotel-Olympics,” saying that if the most prestigious international ski meet were indeed held at a large established ski resort, the commercial overtones would damage the “healthy development of the sport.”
The Scandinavians treasured their own Nordic Games at Stockholm. There, with true skiers in control, commercialism could be held at bay. Said Nikolai Østgaard, the head of the Norwegian association, “In an Olympics, there are so many outside considerations that could be given higher priority at the cost of the ski events.”
Nevertheless, during the association’s 1927 meeting at Lillehammer, members gave in to the glamour of the Olympic aura and voted by a slim margin of two to take part in the St. Moritz Games. From then on, nothing short of war stopped the Olympic bandwagon. With each succeeding Olympics, just as the Norwegians feared, the commercial interests were more firmly in charge.
The U.S. contingent that arrived at St. Moritz consisted solely of three men hastily assembled as America’s ski team. They were even less prepared than the first American team in 1924 at Chamonix. In fact, the U.S. team almost did not get there at all.
Harry Wade Hicks, the new NSA president, found that the previous NSA administration had failed to take up the U.S. Olympic Committee’s matching offer of expense money. There were no funds. Hicks went to work and eventually raised the $1,425 ($12,000 today) needed to send three Americans (less than half the size of the 1924 team) and one manager to St. Moritz.
The NSA picked Charley Proctor, the 1928 Dartmouth ski team captain and U.S. collegiate jumping champ; Rolf Monsen of Lake Placid, USEASA cross country champ; Anders Haugen, 1923 and 1926 U.S. national jumping champ. Asked how the team was chosen, Charley replied, “They hunted around and found some people who were available…”
The team manager was Godfrey Dewey, son of the Lake Placid Club founder Melvil Dewey. Godfrey quietly lobbied the IOC to hold the next Olympics at Lake Placid, New York.
There was no time to train for an Olympics, so the team ran laps on the boat deck going over. There were no U.S. team uniforms, so they brought along bolts of cloth. Swiss seamstresses sewed up the uniforms in time for the opening ceremonies.
After the team arrived at St. Moritz, Dewey had to pay two years back dues out of his own pocket to reinstate NSA as an FIS member. Otherwise, the team would not have been allowed to compete at all. But they did compete finally.
At the opening ceremonies, the weather was dreary and chill. As the teams paraded past, the sparse crowd in the ice rink bleachers resembled the turnout at a U.S. junior varsity high school hockey game more than a spectator throng at an Olympic celebration. Perhaps the guests at St. Moritz—as opposed to the French at Chamonix—were too jaded to attend, preferring the thrill of hotel casino gaming tables.
In the special ski jump, Rolf Monsen took 6th, Charley Proctor 14th, and Anders Haugen 18th. In the combined jump and cross country, Charley Proctor placed 26th. He would have done better in cross country, which Americans were entering for the first time, had he not hurt an elbow in a fall. He had only one arm to pole with in the last part of the race.
Even so, being the world’s 14th best jumper and 26th best in combined was not all that bad for a 22-year-old from Hanover, New Hampshire, the sole native-born American in the St. Moritz Olympic ski events.
Professor Charles N. Proctor, Charley’s father, monitored the FIS meeting at St. Moritz during which the FIS agreed for the first time to experiment with downhill racing, using the format for slalom devised by Britain’s ski guru Arnold Lunn. This was possibly the most important thing that happened at St. Moritz—the beginning of the first breakthrough of alpine events.
Overall, the Norwegians were triumphant again. The Swedes, it is true, cleaned up in the 50-km, taking all three medals but Norway took all three in the 18-km, all three in the jumping (including a silver by Sigmund Ruud of the later- to-be-famous Ruud brothers). The Norwegians took all three medals in combined. And they notched another gold in the military ski race, which they entered for the first time. Plus the Norwegians had the only double gold winner, Johan Grøttumsbråten, who took the 18-km and nordic combined.
One most notable piece of news from the 1928 Games was that the Japanese, entering for the first time, managed to get three of their four entries across the finish line of the 50-km course.
The Winter Olympics were on course, hosting a truly international quadrennial ski meet, attracting participants from the far corners of the ski world. In retrospect, the major missing element was downhill skiing. And yet the very beginnings of it were already in the making. Soon there would be FIS slalom racing. And, after St. Moritz, the first Arlberg-Kandahar, an alpine race in St. Anton, was set up at the instigation of Arnold Lunn. This A-K would prove to be the grandfather of all Olympic alpine racing in the years to come.

LAKE PLACID 1932
Flirting With Disaster

The fact that in 1932 an Olympics came to America is an unlikely story with a bit of strangeness about it—not least of all regarding the mainspring of the idea. The bravura performance by one man, Godfrey Dewey, head of the Lake Placid Club in the New York Adirondacks, brought the 1932 Winter Olympics to Lake Placid. The strong-minded son of a strong-minded father, Godfrey proved to be another great example of that American icon, the one-man band.
Not only did Godfey secure the Games but he carried them off against a run of violent disagreements, horrendous organizational problems, and a catastrophic turn in the weather.
Godfrey’s father Melvil was the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System still used to systematize library books. He also invented a system of simplified spelling. In 1885, he invented the Lake Placid Club, a locale of genteel hiking, tennis, swimming and golf three hundred miles north of New York City, a hundred south of Canada.
In a daring move for the time, Melvil kept the clubhouse open the entire winter of 1905, laying in a supply of toboggans, sleds, snowshoes, and skis. The club broke even on its first snow season and thus became the first continuously operating winter ski resort in North America, a title it still proudly holds. If there was an American Olympics, it ought to be held here, so Godfrey thought.
When Godfrey took over as president of the club in the 1920s, Lake Placid was the leading ski center of the East. A round of New York celebrities who skied there included bandleader Rudy Vallee, singer Kate Smith, and Broadway dancer Marilyn Miller. But even so, Lake Placid was no Chamonix, no St. Moritz.
There were no big Continental hotels, no casinos, no nightlife in the European sense. The largest building was the rambling clubhouse in the faux frontier style known as “adirondack,” with posts and beams more or less as cut from the stump, unpeeled, and roughly trimmed, with a number of guest rooms. In addition, there were large and small cottages available, built in the same mode as the clubhouse, capable of holding entire extended families.
The Lake Placid Club catered to a restricted list of guests, gentiles only, willing to spend a good deal of money on family vacations, who did not mind the strict rules. There was no smoking, no drinking, no ostentatious dress and no “rekles skiing,” as spelled out in simplified Dewey manner.
The idea of putting on an Olympics at a rustic family cottage colony in the Adirondack wilds was staggering in its pretensions. Granted there was an active ski club, officially, the “Lake Placid Sno Birds.” The Sno Birds had always hosted—for the entertainment of its guests—a series of college ski circuit events from 1921 onward when the club built a 35-meter jump at Intervales. And there was a decent outdoor skating rink and good racing tracks on Mirror Lake. In 1927, the Intervales jump was upgraded to 60 meters in anticipation of Lake Placid’s Olympic bid.
Godfrey had good political connections to the current ski establishment. One friend, Fred Harris, had founded the college circuit (after having founded the Dartmouth Outing Club). Harry Wade Hicks, the secretary of the Lake Placid Club, also functioned as secretary of the college circuit and as president of the National Ski Association. That and a million dollars, Godfrey figured, would give him an Olympics.
With Hicks’ help, Godfrey managed in 1928 to insert himself as manager of the 1928 U.S. team at St. Moritz. Before the Olympics, Godfrey himself went on a tour of the top European ski resorts, culminating in Chamonix. Here he went around discreetly lobbying members of the four-year-old FIS and the 32-year-old International Olympic Committee. Godfrey was able to state firmly to one and all that he’d just seen the best Europe had to offer and Lake Placid could match any European resort, at least potentially, in those jumping, cross country, and skating facilities needed to hold an Olympics in 1932.
Not everyone was persuaded by Godfrey’s mighty spin on the facts. At an IOC executive session at the Olympics, the Swedish delegate, Col. Holmquist, declared that in his opinion, although there were ski organizations in the United States and Canada, neither “had the necessary competence to organize ski events.” Nevertheless, the IOC delegates as a whole welcomed the idea of an American Winter Games.
The most obvious alternatives, the Scandinavian countries, simply would not host an Olympics. This left the delegates a choice: either continue to choose an endless round of hotel-centered resorts in the 400-mile radius of the Continental Alps—or go to North America. Going to the U.S. would better fulfill the international aspirations of the Olympic organization. At any rate, the IOC would decide in April 1929 at a meeting in its Lausanne headquarters.
In his 1994 monograph Olympic Perspectives (from which much of the background material for this section of the article was taken), academic ski historian, John Allen, noted, “Godfrey Dewey was in most ways unsuited for the job of managing a world event but he had an outstanding characteristic which often times played against him but which in the final analysis was responsible for the 1932 Winter Games being Godfrey Dewey’s Olympics: a meddling stubbornness to see things through his own way.
“He changed the artist’s designs on the medals, he dealt with the minutiae of bureaucracy… he chose Bjorn Blixen, a Lake Placid Club instructor, to make the rounds of Europe. These were matters he dealt with just as if he were at the Lake Placid Club.”
One of Godfrey’s more obvious mistakes was to have Harry Wade Hicks lay out the Olympic cross country courses, whose design and execution would be widely criticized during the 1932 Games.
But before the Games could become a reality, Godfrey had formidable initial barriers to assail. One of them was persuading then-New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt to fund the quarter-million-dollar construction of the bobsled run with state funds.
Then there was convincing the International Olympic Committee that Lake Placid would build a Cresta sled run that Godfrey had no intention of funding at all.
There was also the matter of winning over the ski nations in the FIS, the group responsible for sanctioning the ski events, who mostly thought of American skiing as being a backwoods kind of thing (true, at the time). Oh, and one other thing. First of all, Godfrey had to block the competing Olympic bid from Yosemite, California.
Yosemite’s bid was headed by William May Garland, president of the California X Olympiad Association. Godfrey wrote Garland a long letter pointing out that winter sport at Yosemite had a much shorter pedigree than at Lake Placid. Specifically, Yosemite had never held a National Ski Association sanctioned tournament. Godfrey was reluctant, he wrote Garland, “to be placed in the position of urging our superior facilities and long experience in winter sports against the express desire of California.” Godfrey suggested therefore that Garland withdraw Yosemite’s bid. Garland replied grimly, “Let the best man win.”
In April 1929 at Lausanne, Godfrey induced the IOC to watch a film making much of Yosemite’s natural beauties, which thereby proved that 1) by comparison, Lake Placid was a sophisticated winter sports center, and 2) Yosemite was not much more than a heavily forested, high mountain valley. The IOC delegates opted for Lake Placid.
To put it kindly, Lake Placid did not have nearly the facilities that had been in place at St. Moritz when it was awarded the Second Winter Olympics. The Lake Placid Games were the first case of an Olympic infrastructure built to harbor an oncoming Games. It was the old American can-do spirit: “If they come we will build it.”
The cost of mounting the Third Winter Olympics reached an astonishing $1 million ($9 million today). It was astonishing relative to the smaller cost of the two previous Olympics and astonishing because the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 had newly precipitated the Great Depression.
But most of the club’s conservative membership was not in a financial bind. Godfrey was able to start things off by selling $200,000 in municipal bonds issued by the adjacent town of North Elba to well-to-do club members and Lake Placid citizens, whose pride and businesses would be considerably heightened by a Lake Placid Olympics. Later North Elba raised $150,000 more with a second issue. Most of the rest would come from New York State, eventually.
Godfrey sent Fred Harris to the 1930 FIS Congress in Oslo representing the National Ski Association, USEASA and the Lake Placid organizing committee.
Harris showed the profiles of the Intervales jumping hill and course plans for the 50-km cross country to the delegates, who seemed content with them. They did object to the proposed $10 ($90 today) entrance fee, saying that Lake Placid, being near New York City, could make a killing. That went against the Olympic ideal.
Harris left the meeting with the solid feeling that though the FIS could at any time pull the rug out from under, the FIS would support Lake Placid.
On the home front, Godfrey was battling the American Olympic Association, whose new president, Avery Brundage, elected in 1929, was donning his fright mask as the once-and-future scourge of the Winter Games. His role would culminate nearly forty years later when Brundage, as president of the IOC, expelled Austrian alpine star Karl Schranz from the 1972 Sapporo Olympics for failing to live up to an already wholly disregarded amateur code.
In 1931, Brundage weighed in at the Lake Placid Olympics with the pronouncement that Lake Placid’s efforts were “doomed to failure” and made it plain that Godfrey Dewey could expect no help from him. Brundage published an AOA fund-raising brochure that year under the signature of U.S. President Herbert Hoover in which the Lake Placid Winter Olympics failed to be mentioned.
Godfrey countered with his own fund-raising brochure, also with a letter signed by President Hoover. Brundage was furious not only because his own fund-raising was being spiked but because Godfrey defrayed the cost of the brochure by carrying advertising. So un-Olympic.
In the meantime, Governor Roosevelt was persuaded to appropriate $125,000 in state funds for the construction of the bobsled run. (It was Roosevelt’s first move toward bolstering outdoor recreation, which would become the hallmark of the future Roosevelt presidential administration.) A bobsled run would obviously bring on tourism, so that was OK.
But when Godfrey lobbied Roosevelt for $400,00 to construct an indoor rink for the skating and hockey finals, Roosevelt was dubious about the benefit to the public of a building that would be in official use for one week before reverting to Lake Placid. It took two more years for Godfrey to convince Roosevelt, but he did. On February 9th, 1931, with the Games exactly a year off, Governor Roosevelt signed a final appropriation for $375,000.
One factor in Roosevelt’s thinking was obviously that, given his intended run against Hoover in the 1932 elections for the U. S. presidency, an Olympic Games guaranteed him exposure to a fine array of U.S. press and newsfilm media. Newsreels in that day provided the equivalent of TV: “news shorts” played before the main features in every U.S. movie house.
By mid-1931, the skating events were secure, the bobsled events were all set and the nordic ski events had been provided for. The alpine events were ignored. Downhill and slalom had been accepted as legitimate by the FIS—which had run its first alpine championships in 1931 at Mürren, Switzerland. And Lake Placid itself had run college slaloms. But Godfrey was anything but anxious to spend scarce resources on downhill courses—which he hadn’t promised anyway.
Seventeen nations, including the U.S., sent a total of 447 skiers, sledders and skaters to the Third Winter Olympics. Approximately a fifth of these were U.S. competitors. The rest came overland and by boat.
Naturally, it was a horrible snow year.
The weather was the warmest on record. The upper reaches of the nearby Hudson River, which had reliably frozen solid every year during the 146 years for which weather records had been kept, did not freeze during the 147th year in the winter of 1932. A major thaw hit two weeks before the Games, with temperatures rising from below zero to 50 degrees in 24 hours, ruining the bobsled run, the cross country courses, the jumps, and skating rinks. The training schedules of skiers, sledders and skaters were badly disrupted.
The weather moderated; tons of snow were dug out of the woods and put onto the courses. Miraculous feats of organization and endurance testified to Godfrey’s ability to get things done. George Carroll quoted Godfrey (in the February 1960 Ski) as saying, “ It was a case of never-say-die. We simply refused to admit defeat. Everyone, our own Olympic staff, the International Committee, village, town and state officials labored day and night.”
The bob run was repaired (the bobsled event was actually allowed to run a week after the Olympics to reach a conclusion). Resurfaced skating ovals grew solid. On February 4, 1932 Governor Roosevelt declared the Third Winter Games open and called for world peace. (The Japanese had already opened the preliminaries of World War II by invading Chinese Manchuria.) U.S. skater Jack Shea took the Olympic pledge on behalf of all the competitors.
Two non-skiing events were of interest to the future of skiing. Billy Fiske, the 1928 bobsled gold medalist, won again at the Lake Placid bobsled run and became a national hero. Having learned about skiing at two Olympics, he had become a skier himself. In 1936, he was one of three men to finance the first high alpine ski accommodations in the U.S., the Highland Bavarian Lodge outside Aspen. Many big names in skiing, from Dartmouth ski god Otto Schniebs on down, came to stay at Highland Bavarian and published illustrated accounts. Fiske’s effort had a wondrous effect in advertising the mountain beauty of the setting of what would become U.S. skiing’s first megaresort, Aspen.
In the Lake Placid figure skating, Norway’s Sonja Henie came in head and shoulders over the competition, scoring her second Olympic gold (her first had been at St. Moritz). Launched before the American public from her Lake Placid Olympic platform, Sonja would take on a Hollywood film career and star in the most famous ski movie of all time, her 1941 Sun Valley Serenade.
(Sonja’s skiing in the film was done by doubles, and she never actually went to Sun Valley at all—her scenes were shot on the studio sound stages—but Henie’s glamor added up to an enormous boost, almost as much as the 1932 Olympics themselves, to U.S. recreational skiing.
At Lake Placid’s ski events, the U.S. did not cover itself with glory. Of twelve U.S. men competing, only Casper Oimen made any headway in the record books, coming in fifth, second highest score in an Olympic ski event for the U.S. to date.)
In the 18-kilometer, Norway’s Johan Grøttumsbråten, double gold medalist in the 1928 Games, was beaten by two Swedes, Sven Utterstrom and Axel Vikstrom. The Swedes had a secret weapon: a diet of brown beans, oatmeal, salt herring and knackebrød (like a diet crisp), especially prepared by the Swedish team’s traveling cook. Ollie Zetterstrom, the first American in the 18-km, placed 23rd. The next day, in the combined jump, Grøttumsbråten scored high enough to win the nordic combined gold, the first back-to-back golds in an Olympic ski event.
The 50-km proved to be one of the most contentious events. The snow finally came with a vengeance: the season’s first blizzard broke upon Lake Placid on the day of the race. The course had been laid out to double back on itself, which so angered some of the coaches that three hours were spent in arguing the point back and forth while the blizzard got worse. When the race finally came off, the high-seeded starters broke track through soft, new-fallen snow and were soundly beaten by relative unknowns who started later with the advantage of a solidly-packed track. The winner was Saarinen of Finland, followed by his countryman Likkanen, who had started in 23rd place.
Next to photogenic Sonja, the press paid most attention to the exotic entry: Japan. The Japanese were not only copying the military ways of the West with a vengeance but entering the world athletic contests—two faces of a single nationalist coin.
Time, in reporting on the Games, turned Norwegian gold medalist Birger Ruud into “Birger Rudd,” and superskater Sonja Henie into “Sonja Henje.” Time insisted on marveling at “the amazing incompetence of the Japanese…The Japanese fancy skaters, who had studied this sport in books, found it hard to keep their footing…two Japanese skiers were injured by turning somersaults off the ski jump, and another who fell down in front of the schoolhouse, amused Lake Placid children by his inability to get up.”
The Japanese, contrary to Time’s version, were neither wholly incompetent nor lacking innovation and courage. During the 50-km, a Japanese assistant coach set up a portable wind-up record player at the most difficult part of the course, a steep ravine. As each Japanese skier came up to him, the coach would wind up his machine and blast out the Japanese national anthem, which so galvanized each Japanese competitor that he scaled the ravine’s uphill side at a roaring clip.
Although the top Japanese jumper, Gaio Adachi, spun into the grandstand in a training jump at the Intervales hill and was hospitalized, he got up from his hospital bed to post jumps of 196 and 215 feet. He placed eighth. It was obviously a mistake to underestimate the Japanese. (In 1972 at the Sapporo Olympics, the Japanese swept all three ski jump medals.)
The amazing heroics of the Japanese aside, Norway dominated the jumping by sweeping the special jump. Birger Ruud getting the gold, the first of his clutch of Olympic medals. And Norway took third in the 50-km as well, to make it seven medals in three of the four nordic events.
The Norwegians remained fanatic about maintaining the Games as a shrine to pure amateurism. They protested the presence of Lake Placid ski pro Erling Strom, tending the jump hill during the Games. The Norwegians felt equally strongly that the sanctity of the original aim of the Games, competition of individual against individual, was openly violated by the country-vs-country slant of U.S. news reportage.
The Norwegians’ anger was not the least bit mollified when New York Sun columnist Edwin B. Dooley reminded readers that the approximately 90 American entries in all the Lake Placid events—including skating, figure skating, and bobsled—had “a combined point total only a few [points] more than…a handful of Norwegians.”
Over 80,000 tickets were sold for the Third Winter Games, making it by far the most popular Olympics to date. Among the attendees were the world’s most famous radio newscaster, Lowell Thomas, reporting from location, and Admiral Richard Byrd, scouting the cross-country competitors for rugged specimens who might be persuaded to come on Byrd’s next polar expedition.
Press coverage was much more positive and widespread than Godfrey Dewey had anticipated in his happiest fantasies. Some of the coverage, granted, was a bit hyperbolic. The main hangout of the good old boys among reporters was in the basement bar of a local inn where newsmen held nearly all the seats. Columnist Westbrook Pegler called it “the Cellar Athletic Club.” George Carroll wrote, “Some of the most dramatic stories of the week were filed by reporters who got no closer to the bob run or the ski jump.”
The 1932 Olympics recruited one of the sports’ staunchest and most effective advocates. “It was the Olympics at Lake Placid that really sold me on skiing,” wrote Lowell Thomas in the February 1960 Ski Life, saying he had gotten hooked when Erling Strom gave him his first formal ski lesson during the Olympics. Lowell’s subsequent radio broadcasts, spanning Mt. Tremblant to Aspen, were the kind of exposure publicity agents dream about. Lowell’s nightly audiences registered in the multi-millions and he was usually at a resort for a week or more.
Lake Placid’s official post-Olympic notices were mixed. The Technical Committee of the FIS was less than laudatory, commenting somewhat acidly on Godfrey’s tendency to maintain tight control by using only trusted aides. “Too big a burden was undoubtedly placed on too few men’s shoulders and those did not manage to perform all that was up to them. They also lacked skilled helpers possessing knowledge and initiative. The arrangements for the skiing contests must be termed unsatisfactory due to the fact that management was not entrusted to experts.”
But in his report, IOC president Count de Ballait-Latour praised Godfrey, saying the IOC was “more than pleased at the plans made for staging the Games in Lake Placid, facilities for the conduct of sports and other arrangements.” He noted “the exceptional manner in which this obligation was discharged, a great task masterfully handled.”
The closing ceremonies were presided over by New York City Major Jimmy Walker, who could never pass up a party anywhere, even in the snow. The crowds cheered Walker as they had cheered Roosevelt, and cheered winners and losers the whole ten days. The general public tone was one of excitement and general self-congratulation that a small American mountain town in splendid natural surroundings had been readied successfully for such a gigantic international event. The 1932 event was unique in that, for the first time, it was apparent that what big St. Moritz could do, a little American village could do, too: the proof was there. And the world paid attention.

GARMISCH
Hitlers Olympics

The 1936 Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany was a riveting affair. It had Adolf Hitler, it had the first nationwide Olympic effort and the first huge central Olympic ski stadium. It had the first Olympic alpine races, and the first Olympic women’s ski races. There was worldwide media coverage in press, film—even the first Olympic TV. The Fourth Winter Olympic Games were an international spectacle.
This time around, there had been no denying alpine events their place. The FIS had already held five alpine world championships for both men and women since the first ones in 1931. In addition, there had been eight Arlberg-Kandahars for both men and women since the first one in 1928. The Arlberg-Kandahar was open to anyone, and even more prestigious than FIS championships. Combined A-K winners were seen as champions of the entire ski world, not just FIS champions.
Women’s Olympic ski racing had won a place on the Olympic menu thanks largely to the British. The Brits had run women’s races almost from the beginning as they went about the founding of alpine ski racing. To have alpine racing at all, the Olympic brass had to take on women’s racing, too.
Luckily, the alpine events came across in the media as especially dramatic, and thus Garmisch became the first fashionable showcase for alpine racing. From then on, they were the high glamor events of the Winter Games.
The Olympic Committee balked at the eighteen medals normally awarded in an FIS world championship: three each for slalom, downhill and combined for both men and women. At Garmisch, the IOC offered only three alpine medals for men and three for women—for the combined slalom-downhill score—a total of six medals.
That took a little bit of the edge off alpine’s Olympic debut. But even more of an edge was taken off by a particularly obtuse decision of the International Olympic Committee just six months before Garmisch opened. The IOC, after years of dispute, finally banned all ski instructors as “professionals.” The ruling immediately sank the Swiss and Austrian hopes. The best Swiss and Austrian alpine racers had always served as star instructors between competitions. Switzerland and Austria were so upset, both countries boycotted the entire Garmisch Winter Olympics.
The French and German situation was different. These countries’ top alpine racers were supported by government training grants and thus technically not instructors. The twisted logic, therefore, was that the French and German skiers paid to race were amateur while Swiss and Austrians not paid to race were professional.
No ranking American racers were ski instructors, so the ruling was a break for the U. S. But on the whole, the gleam of the first alpine Olympic events had been considerably dimmed.
Yet, the show went on. And it was the best show yet. German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, head of the ruling Nazi party, backed the bid for the Garmisch Games with Germany’s full faith and credit. For the first time, a nation rather than a resort was the locus of power in a Winter Olympics.
Germany expended money lavishly. Hitler ordered the neighboring resorts of Garmisch and Partenkirchen amalgamated into a single entity, “Garmisch-Partenkirchen.” The Germans built an “Olympia bob run” for the 1934 world bobsled championships and rebuilt it for the 1936 Olympics. They built an “Artificial Ice Stadium” (where Sonja Henie would pick up her third gold in a row).
The Germans rebuilt the Gaudeberg jump for the nordic combined and built a brand new 60-meter jump for the Olympic special jump competition. A stadium of some grandeur was built surrounding the outrun of both jumps and the finish area for cross country and slalom racing. In all, the German effort put the Lake Placid effort in the shade, giving Garmisch the first modern Winter Olympic stadium.
Hitler had assumed dictatorial powers by 1936. His sports ministry had been grooming German alpine racers for two years. Having never before won a Winter Olympic ski medal, Germany was ready.
Hitler’s modus operandi was succinctly analyzed by Arnold Lunn, Britain’s maximum ski guru and something of a Winston Churchill character, a man who never suffered for lack of pointed words.
“ …it is essential,” wrote Lunn, “for a dictator to prove that the prestige of a country is due to the regime, and so must therefore contribute the ideological propaganda. The young Nazis were encouraged to believe that a ski race was a competition in which Germans raced to prove not that they were better skiers than other people but that Nazism was better than democracy.
“The thing that mattered and the only thing that mattered, was victory, and all means which led to this end were justifiable. At the Olympic Games in Garmisch, the [downhill] course was closed to all competitors the day before the race. The Nazis, we subsequently learned, practiced down the course at dawn.”
“The technique of making protests was developed into a fine art. If the Nazi flag was not displayed with sufficient prominence, a protest was promptly lodged. Any decision that could be challenged was challenged.” Garmisch’s Olympics were the first modern Winter Games in more ways than one.
The American teams headed into the Garmisch Games had been fairly chosen for the first time. The alpine men’s team had been picked in part at the first-ever U.S. Olympic alpine trials on Mt. Rainier, Washington, the previous April. And the U.S. Olympic Committee had provided passage money to some of the higher-ranked members. The rest paid their own transportation.
The U.S. men’s team represented the very first generation of American alpine competitors, mostly arising in the previous half-dozen years from intercollegiate and interclub competition. Alpine competitions themselves had been sparse. There had been three national downhills beginning in 1933 and the first national slalom had been held less than a year before the Olympics. Alpine was a brand new sport in the U.S.
Two of the U.S. team members would later come to national fame not only for having been on the first U.S. alpine team but for lifelong involvement with the sport. Dick Durrance would return to America as the preeminent U.S. alpine racer, a position he would hold through the decade. He would represent Dartmouth as the best U.S. college racer, and retire the Harriman Cup, the only U.S. international fixture in 1939. He would become Aspen’s CEO, then become the top U.S. film maker of ski films with sound. His first film was a fine record of the 1950 Aspen World Championships.
Alex Bright was the Eastern lodestar of alpine skiing in the U.S. He’d been a charter member of Boston’s Ski Club Hochgebirge, founded in 1930. After the Olympics, he became one of the most indefatigable U.S. racers, competing for thirty years, a living connection to alpine skiing’s remotest American past. Alex also initiated and promoted the first U.S. ski area cable car on Cannon Mountain in 1938.
To get back to the American men’s team at Garmisch: it was not overburdened by international racing experience. The most experienced was Dick Durrance. He had grown up in Garmisch itself, and raced against German kids as a teenager. He had taken a 16th in the 1933 Arlberg-Kandahar, the highest international score for any U.S. racer to the beginning of the Garmisch Games.
Al Lindley and Norman Read had taken the trip abroad in 1933 and entered the FIS world championships. Al scored a 29th. Norman came in 51st. He was not a young man—52 by the time the Olympics rolled around, still the record for the oldest American on the U.S. ski team. The fact that Read was there at all indicates the dire lack of skilled alpine racers in the U.S.
Alex Bright was no youngster either—39 by the time he reached Garmisch in 1936. But in a trip abroad in 1935, he had come in 26th in the combined FIS.
George Page had gained international experience racing for England’s Cambridge University team. In the 1935 FIS combined, George had taken 28th.
And that was it. A half dozen or so races on the world championship level entered by a half dozen racers constituted the entire international experience of the men’s squad arriving at Garmisch.
Some team members were picked at least partly on their results at the first U.S. slalom championships and sixth U.S. downhill championships—which made up the Olympic trials at Mt. Rainier in 1935. Dick Durrance had been the leading U.S. scorer. No matter that he had been beaten to first place by the Austrian Hannes Schroll, who entered in the Open category—neither Schroll nor any other Austrian racer would appear at Garmisch.
At the 1935 trials, Dartmouth team members Linc Washburn placed third in downhill and Ted Hunter fifth in slalom. Bob Livermore of the Hochgebirge Ski Club had come in second in the slalom, and Darroch Crookes had taken a ninth.
Don Fraser had won the 1934 Silver Skis on Mt. Rainier, but missed the 1935 trials on Mt. Rainier because of a broken leg. His passage had not been paid so he worked his way over to the Olympics on a banana boat.
The men’s training was compressed into a short month. They had not trained as a team before, and one thing that the U.S. Olympic Committee had not provided was a coach. Their manager, Californian Joel Hildebrand, dean of men at Berkeley, had no real racing experience to pass on to his team.
Dick Durrance suggested that the team get a day’s coaching from Toni Seelos, the acknowledged European alpine king who had been barred from competing. He was hired by the Americans to ready them for a tune-up race at Kitzbühel.
“We arrived a day early,” recalls Dick, “and Seelos gave us a full day of coaching. We followed him, basically—that was what it all boiled down to—but we were amazed at how easily he skied very fast. So we did pick up a few pointers just mimicking him… [he skied] very relaxed, his feet together, very little effort but he went like blazes.”
The Garmisch training courses for the men turned out to be very rough. Durrance sprained an ankle five days before the Olympics and had to be taped for the races. Don Fraser injured himself badly in slalom practice and was out for the Olympics. Ted Hunter hit a rock in downhill practice and was out for the season.
The U.S. men faced a formidable opposition. The top Germans, Franz Pfnür and Gustav Lantschner had been training for two years with no expense spared. A third potential winner, France’s phenomenal Emile Allais, was just coming into his own. And then there were Norway’s Ruud brothers, Birger and Sigmund, among the world’s top jumpers but also strong in alpine. Both had done well in European downhills in the past. After all, what is the difference between a big ski jump inrun and a downhill?
That brings us to the women. Just because the U.S. Olympic Committee supported the U.S. men’s team to some extent didn’t entice them to do the same for the women. As a matter of fact, they did nothing. That left the women’s team as a private affair arranged by Alice Kiaer, daughter of the New York Symphony conductor Walter Damrosch.
Alice had decided two years before the Garmisch Games that the U.S. ought to have a women’s team. She raised the money to take a squad to St. Anton to train under coach Otto Furrer, a Swiss champion.
Kiaer brought “her girls” and Otto back to Garmisch for the 1936 Olympics. As team member Clarita Heath recalls, “On January 1, 1936, the squad of 13 of us gathered in St. Anton-am-Arlberg…We also went to other resorts and finally to Davos where there were opportunities to ride uphill, giving us more downhill time. Thirty-eight days is not long enough to prepare for the race of your life.”
“Our manager, [Mrs. Kiaer] provided our trainer, rounded up her American friends who drove us hither and yon when it was needed. They assisted us in many ways such as timing, organizing and comforting.
“Otherwise we paid our own way and were responsible for assembling our uniforms. It was decided we would wear navy sweaters, white jackets, navy knickers and red stockings.” (In the press, The American women’s team became The Red Stockings.)
Kiaer herself credited much to Roland Palmedo, president of the Amateur Ski Club of New York. “[He] was the prime organizer and backer… In fact, I doubt if there would have been a girls’ Olympic team without him. He arranged all the complicated red tape with the Olympic Committee, he raised some money, and above all else he had just that enthusiasm and tact which makes people eager to do things with him and for him.”
Among the more interesting women on the women’s team was Mary Bird, first woman to ski the Tuckerman Headwall. After the Games, she taught for Benno Rybizka at his school in Jackson, New Hampshire and then became the wife of Chris Young, an outstanding pioneer ski film maker, who worked for Lowell Thomas’ films.
A second American woman, Clarita Heath, had learned to ski only a year before the Olympics on a ski vacation with her mother at Kitzbühel, and was such a natural she became good enough to enter regional races in the Tyrol.
A third American, Betty Woolsey, had been invited after having won a race at Suicide Six in Vermont and taken a 22nd at the 1935 FIS. She turned out to be our top racer and continued to race after the Olympics in Europe and in the U.S. In the 1940s, she became editor of Ski Illustrated magazine in New York before it was bought and moved to Hanover, New Hampshire.
Some were selected on international experience. Helen Boughton-Leigh, an American married to a Brit, had taken a seventh in the 1935 FIS women’s combined. Lilo Schwartzenbach had taken a 26th in that race and Mary Bird a 29th.
Others had been selected from the 1935 Olympic trials at Mt. Rainier. Ellis Ayre-Smith had taken two firsts; her sister Ethelene had taken sixth combined; Grace Carter had scored two seconds. These women from the Northwest held bake sales to pay for their month-long steamship passage through the Panama Canal to Hamburg.
The German women had been training for two years on a cost-is-no-object basis. “I shall never forget,” wrote Alice Kiaer, “when those healthy German frauleins marched in at mealtime and tucked away sausage and sauerkraut. Their cheeks were so red and shiny and their figures so strong and stout.”
Not stout but terribly strong was Germany’s Christl Cranz, reigning women’s world champ. The one barrier to Cranz’ triumph was Norway’s 16-year-old, Laila Schou-Nilsen, who looked sensational in her trial runs.
And then, finally, opening day was at hand—and it snowed heavily. Adolf Hitler appeared on the podium, effortlessly bringing the opening-ceremony crowd of 80,000 to a fever pitch of nationalism. The Germans were kept from rushing toward Der Führer by a double cordon of Storm Troopers linked arm-in-arm.
On February 7, the day of the men’s downhill, the course was not good—rough ice camouflaged by new snow. Extra control flags were set. Nevertheless, the course was risky and at the bottom of the course the snow was warm. Racers found themselves poling desperately across a third-of-a-mile flat toward the end.
In spite of the German’s secret practice session, the winner was Norway’s Birger Ruud. He had hit the wax, having telephoned from the top to a friend below to get the temperature. The last part of the course was so slow Birger averaged only 26 miles an hour.
The German’s chagrin was mollified when Pfnür and Lantschner came in second and third. Durrance missed the wax and finished 11th. “I had to pole and pole and pole,” he recalls. “I poled my heart out. It was awful…I was terribly, terribly disappointed.”
In the women’s downhill, a German sweep was foiled when Christl Cranz fell and Laila Schou-Nilsen beat her, becoming the first 16-year old ever to win an Olympic ski event. Betty Woolsey turned in the best U.S. performance with a 16th.
In the men’s slalom, the Germans won, Pfnür and Lantschner one-two. Emile Allais came in third. Durrance finished eighth after a dubious six-second penalty for straddling a gate (back then the racer was penalized rather than DQ’d). Dick had the third fastest time to the final gate, and knocked over one pole but says he is sure he did not straddle it. He was furious when Hildebrand refused to protest the call.
The next two Americans, George Page and Bob Livermore, came in 14th and 18th.
The combined alpine medals—the only ones given—were handed out to Pfnür, Lantschner and Allais in that order. Durrance had the top U.S. alpine combined score with 10th place. George Page was 13th and Robert Livermore 23rd.
In women’s slalom, Cranz won as expected. Women’s combined winners were Cranz, first; Kathe Grasseger of Germany, second; Norway’s Laila Schou-Nilsen, third. Betty Woolsey was 19th in combined, Helen Boughton-Leigh 21st, Clarita Heath 27th.
So many of Europe’s best racers had been banned that America’s perfomance could only be charitably viewed as a “good try.” There was a long, long road ahead to the heights attained by the U.S. ski team of Phil Mahre, Steve Mahre and Tamara McKinney.
It did not lift the U.S. team’s spirits that their fellow North Americans from Canada fared worse. Canadian team member Bill Ball was struck by how far standards of skiing in Canada had fallen behind those of Europe since his last visit. Norway’s Birger Ruud was the hero of the 1936 Games. Having taken the downhill, Birger proceeded to win the special jump before a record crowd of 130,000 in the stadium. He had scored the second back-to-back golds in an Olympic ski event.
It was also the first and the last time a skier won both nordic and alpine events. The rules changed: skiers could be nordic or alpine competitors, but not both.
By the end of the 1936 Garmisch Olympics, the Winter Games had for the first time been solidly established as a quintessential quadrennial international celebration of the sport, a popular one. Ironically, the aftermath of the very successful Garmisch Olympics was—no more Olympics, not for a while.
The 1940 Olympics were scheduled for Sapporo, Japan but Japan cancelled after being stung by criticism of its invasion of China. The Olympics were rescheduled for Garmisch but cancelled again when World War II intervened. Twelve years would elapse between the Garmisch Games and the revival of the Winter Olympics in the post-World War II Winter Games of 1948 at St. Moritz. But it was held, finally, in a better, more peaceful world.

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